


Seventh Years

by zephsomething



Series: Surviving the War [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 20:18:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12967614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zephsomething/pseuds/zephsomething
Summary: After the battle of hogwarts those who were part of the DA clump together regardless of house lines.





	Seventh Years

The morning of the first day of classes after the Battle of Hogwarts most kids stayed in clumps together at their house tables. Hermione however scanned the room until she located the bright red of Ginny’s hair next to the silvery blonde of Luna’s and headed towards them.  The two of them were sitting across from Neville and Hannah at the hufflepuff table but Hermione dropped into the seat next to Ginny without much thought. A handful of other’s she only vaguely recognized as being in Ginny’s year were either already sitting at the table or were making their way towards the grouping.

“You’re sitting at the wrong table.” A shaking voice said and Hermione looked up from one of her poli-sci university books to see one of the kids who’d been sorted only yesterday, fresh gold and red trim sewn onto their robes. The kid was shaking and their hands tightened on their class schedule. “That’s the hufflepuff table.”

“So it is.” Hermione nodded but before she could think of anything else to say Luna was off the bench and kneeling in front of the child.

“You’ve got wackspurts in your ears.” Luna said it in a voice as serious as she ever had and the child stared like they couldn’t tell if she was kidding. “They make your brain fuzzy, lets you see lines that aren’t really there.”

“Think happy thoughts, they’ll be gone in a jiffy.” Ginny leaned around Hermione to grin at the kid. The kid just frowned at the three of them for a moment before going to sit with another group of small kids at the Gryffindor table.

As the others went back to talking Hermione frowned down at the timetable she had perched among her books. The first years were so small, they looked so much like children. As she stared at the paper memories rose to the surface, facing off against a mountain troll in the girls bathroom, Fluffy snapping at their heels as they landed in deadly plants, Ron being knocked off a chess board, and Harry stepping through fire. She glanced up at the kids again. Had they really been that small when Dumbledore had put bait for the not yet healed Voldemort in the center of the school?

Beside her Ginny was smiling, laughing along with the others at how nice it was that sitting at the wrong table seemed their biggest problem this year. Later though Ginny would curl up in her four poster bed and remind herself that there were no journals, no magic diaries at the school this year. There would be no pale and worried first years getting more and more sure of their failing sanity as Voldemort used their hands to start terrible things, used their life to bring himself back to something like living. The basilisk was dead in the bowels of the castle and the journal was destroyed. She would curl her hands into fists and reminded herself that she survived, she’d fought Voldemort twice and lived.

Neville had watched the first year go back to the ‘right’ table, said something about the size of their problems, and laughed with everyone else. In his mind though he was contrasting that child with the first years of the year before, with the way they’d clenched their fists and practiced curse after curse in the room of requirement, the way those eleven year olds had become soldiers and these ones would get to be children. Later in the common room he’d see the kid again and think about himself, eleven and scared and standing in front of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they prepared to go break more rules because he thought it was right.

Hannah laughed as Neville commented on the size of their problems and thought about the things that had made children shake last year. She spared a moment of her day to be glad that some things ended. Later when she couldn’t sleep in her yellow and black common room she’d spare a few more moments to mourn the childhoods that had ended last year, then she’d get up and check on her lists, on the first and second and third years who were (for the most part) asleep, and she’d walk down to the greenhouses without bothering to make herself invisible. She went out and buried her hands in the soil because she’d been making things grow out here in the face of death for years and there was no point in stopping now.

Luna smiled at the child who frowned as she talked about wackspurts. When her thoughts drifted they didn’t drift to the year before and those children who’d been shaking or to her first year and the gradually paling redhead in her charms class. Her thoughts drifted back to an even smaller child who’d been crouching in the doorway of her mum’s workshop for years watching her make spells out of thin air. A child who watched a spell go wrong, because they do that sometimes, watched it bubble green foam out of her mum’s wand for a long few seconds before it exploded. When the old memories got to be a bit much Luna walked up and up and up, as close to the sky as she could get and leaned out into the air to remind herself that the world was so much more than it had seemed at nine as she’d watched half her world explode. She looked up at the clouds to remind herself that nothing really ended, it just changed its shape.

 


End file.
